Climate Change and Food Availability in the Deep

“The vast muddy expanses of the abyssal plains occupy about 60 percent of the Earth’s surface and are important in global carbon cycling. Changes in the Earth’s climate can cause unexpectedly large changes in deep-sea ecosystems. Based on 18 years of studies, MBARI’s Ken Smith and his coauthors showed that such ecosystem changes occur over short time scales of weeks to months, as well as over longer periods of years to decades.”